Year
2015
Abstract
We investigate the sensitivity of a kiloton scale Gd-doped water Cherenkov detector with 1500 m.w.e. overburden to determine the direction of an incident nuclear reactor antineutrino flux with the elastic antineutrino-electron scattering interaction (? ¯ + e-? ? ¯ + e-). The expected electron scattering rate ee was estimated assuming the detector is placed 13 km away from a light water nuclear reactor operating at 3.758 GWt to be consistent with a recently proposed antineutrino detector project (WATCHMAN). Numerous sources of background were studied including cosmogenic radionuclides, solar neutrinos, misidentified inverse beta decay interactions from the reactor, water-borne radon, and gamma rays from the photomultiplier tubes, detector walls, and surrounding rock. The rates were estimated by scaling published measurements from similar neutrino and antineutrino detectors. Preliminary results indicate that with clean detector components, low radioactivity PMTs, and large buffer thickness, water-borne radon and cosmogenic radionuclides will act as the dominate sources of background. We conclude the study by discussing the relative energy spectra of the signal and background and propose potential analysis methods that could be used to produce a statistically significant directional signal.